Sony Media Manager Finally Arrives For PSP

The fact that the PSP is so much more than a games machine is cause for much celebration, hat waving and all round slapping of backs. Problem is many users are still confused how to get this additional media onto their little boxes of joy, so Sony has decided to lend a long overdue helping hand.

“Media Manager” is a piece of software designed to simplify the process of transferring photos, music and videos, whilst also backing up those all important save games. It works via a USB cable which connects from the PSP to a PC and supports a mass of file formats including MP3, OGG, BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIF, M4A, MP4, AVI, MPG, MOV and WMV and comes with Sony’s AVC (H.264) encoding protocol.

Bitrates can be adjusted within the manager and an automatic folder creation system keeps everything organised. What’s more, the new app also has its own built in podcast feed which updates the latest streams to your PSP. A built in directory of the most popular music, spoken word, photo, magazine, video and comic strip podcasts are included to get you started.

To be honest, Sony has been long overdue in producing software like this and there are already a host of established third party offerings available from the likes of iPSP and the free PSP Video 9. It is also rather cheeky that the company is asking for $19.99 to download Media Manager from its website, since this is the kind of management tool we could reasonably expect to have seen included with the PSP from day one. A second $25 packaged version of Media Manager is also available bundled with a USB cable.

I suspect whether or not you cough up the cash is largely going to depend on your levels of computer literacy, with advanced users capable of doing all this stuff for themselves anyway. Besides, no one who reads us could be anything less than a certified genius… right guys? ;)